Affordable, Transparent Pricing Meets a Rich Feature Set and 24/7 Support at Asura Hosting

TL; DR: Asura Hosting was launched in 2012 to achieve the seemingly impossible — offer efficient, fast, and reliable web services at low price points. Since then, the company has maintained that goal, providing valuable yet feature-rich hosting plans to the owners of 20,000 websites across nearly 90 countries. Asura Hosting’s NVMe SSD drives, Node.js hosting plans, and partnerships with Cloudflare, Litespeed, and cPanel are a fit for developers, SMBs, bloggers, and ecommerce shops alike.

Many customers who search for reliable yet affordable hosting find themselves in a catch-22. A quick Google search reveals how easy it is to find cheap, bare-bones hosting services. The same abundance applies to providers who will happily trade top-notch hosting for artificially high pricing.

Worse yet, some hosts waive hefty charges for the first year, leaving customers surprised by expensive renewal rates and trapped by vendor lockin.

According to Carlojou Tavares, high-quality web services and low, transparent price points don’t have to be mutually exclusive — and he founded Asura Hosting in 2012 to prove it.

“I saw an opportunity to provide an affordable flat-rate pricing model with high performance and uptime rates and some of the best customer support in the industry,” Carlojou said. “And it ended up paying off for the company and our customers.”

Today, after nearly a decade in the industry, Asura Hosting serves more than 12,000 customers across the globe, who trust the company to host more than 20,000 websites. The company strives to bring reliability, speed, and affordability together via plans featuring around-the-clock support, free SSL certificates, NVMe SSD drives, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Partnerships with Cloudflare, cPanel, and Litespeed allow Asura Hosting to bundle plans with industry-leading software while maintaining affordable pricing. And all web hosting plans come equipped with Softaculous, an intuitive resource that allows users to install popular applications like WordPress, Joomla, and WHMCS in seconds, without renewal hikes.

This unique approach merges affordability with premium products and services, helping the company attract a range of customers, from small-business owners and freelancers to developers and resellers.

Carlojou started Asura Hosting, based out of Montréal, as a privately owned company in 2012. Over the years, the company has expanded its web hosting locations to include New York City, Germany, and London. His goal has always been to treat customers with the utmost respect and care while offering a reliable and affordable product.

“I just love infrastructure and networking, so I first started Asura Hosting as a hobby before transitioning it into a full-blown business,” Carlojou said. “It started to gain traction because I differentiated from providers that have very shady pricing agreements.”

Carlojou told us many providers will start with an affordable entry price, such as $10 a year, only to introduce hidden renewal charges of nearly six times the entry price.

“Some will make it extremely hard to leave the platform — I’ve seen it all,” he said. “That’s why we offer a completely flatlined pricing scheme. The initial payment will always be the same as the payments going forward. We aim for the most transparent, straightforward pricing model possible with no vendor lock-in.”

Asura’s product offerings are wide-ranging, from domain registry to shared virtual service solutions and options for resellers. The common thread between all of the company’s services is affordability — even for feature-rich packages.

The company’s Starter, Unlimited, and Unlimited Plus plans, for example, are all available at low rates. These plans, which start as low as $1 per month, offer unlimited bandwidth, free SSL certificates, and free access to more than 400 applications via Softaculous.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, in which web criminals use multiple systems to overwhelm a network with an excess of traffic, have become all too common.

According to Cloudflare, the frequency and sophistication of these attacks increased significantly in 2020. Network-layer attacks doubled from Q1 to Q2 and again from Q2 to Q3. Ransom-driven DDoS attacks (RDDoS) are also on the rise, with groups like Fancy Bear, Cozy Bear, and the Lazarus Group extorting organizations across the globe.

To protect customers from such threats, Asura Hosting provides essential anti-DDoS solutions on all hosting plans at no additional cost.

“Back in the period of about 2013 to 2016, DDoS attacks were huge, and hosting companies that didn’t have adequate product protection or mitigation methods would get shut down almost instantly,” Carlojou said. “We implemented Cloudflare’s Magic Transit, one of the strongest DDoS protection solutions available.”

Asura Hosting’s network traffic is routed through Cloudflare, where it is inspected for attacks, filtered, steered, accelerated, and sent back to the company’s servers.

“We haven’t had a single incident in over four years now,” Carlojou said.
In addition to Cloudflare, the company partners with Litespeed and is a cPanel partner via a Partner NOC Agreement. All hosting packages include access to a premium drag-and-drop website builder via a partnership with SitePad, which comes with more than 200 premium themes and widgets.

“We try to cut costs in almost every way for our clients,” Carlojou said. “We pass any savings we receive through our partnerships to our customers, and we never increase pricing when we add something new.”

In 2020, Asura Hosting launched its new Node.js Hosting Plans, giving developers the power to run Node.js applications on its web hosting platform. These plans feature a built-in application launcher for Node.js applications, making it easier than ever to set up the server environment, meet app requirements, and reboot, disable, and edit the application when needed.

Asura Hosting also recently entered into a partnership with WHMCS, a simple billing and automation management tool for web hosting businesses. The partnership will help developers and resellers simplify their businesses through automated solutions at a great rate.

“Through our partnership, we offer WHMCS at up to 60% less than retail price to our resellers,” Carlojou said.

The company also offers a turnkey reseller package that allows users to sell Asura Hosting products under their own branding. Features include a built-in store, product management suite, help desk, and client area, plus exclusive products to sell to clients.

Carlojou told us that Asura Hosting also aims to make building and maintaining a web presence as easy as possible for bloggers and small-business owners via top-notch support.

“We offer some of the best support in the industry, with response rates of around 15 minutes,” he said. “On top of extremely quick and proficient technical support, we have run on fast NVMe — some of the fastest solid-state drives available.”

Plus, all Unlimited Hosting plans allow users to easily select between two of the most popular web hosting control panels on the internet: cPanel and Direct Admin. Both supported control panels feature similar, easy-to-navigate user interfaces and the same feature set.

Moving forward, the team at Asura Hosting plans to further upgrade its already highly performant infrastructure with new AMD EPYC servers and even better DDoS protection.

“Our new AMD EPYC servers are going to increase our performance by 40%,” Carlojou said.

The company will also ramp up its loyalty program, which it began offering midway through 2020.

“Clients that are with us for say one to two years and have a positive payment profile will get rewards in the form of discounts, exclusive products, and priority support,” he said.